In a Long Term Evolution (Long Term Evolution, LTE for short) and an LTE-advanced (LTE-advanced, LTE-A for short) system, a base station sends a paging (Paging) message to instruct user equipment (User Equipment, UE for short) in an idle state (Idle) to establish a service or to notify the UE that a system message is changed, and the UE needs to re-read a changed system message, or the like. According to a paging message sending range, paging is classified into the following two manners: paging area paging and cell paging. A paging area includes multiple cells. In the paging area paging manner, a paging message is sent in an entire paging area, and is mainly used to instruct UE in an idle state to establish a service. In the cell paging manner, a paging message is sent only in a cell, and is mainly used to notify UE in the cell that cell system information is changed.
In the prior art, when the paging area paging is performed, multiple base stations page same UE in multiple cells, that is, the multiple base stations each send a paging message, and the base stations use different cell scrambling code to scramble the paging messages when sending the paging messages. Therefore, although content included in the paging messages of the multiple cells is the same, because different cells use different cell scrambling code to scramble the paging messages, the paging messages interfere with each other, and a paging success rate of the UE is relatively low.